Athens Vs Rome Dbq Essay

Between Athens and Rome, I believe Rome had the better system of citizenship.

Two different citizenship systems- Athenian and Roman- was the better system? First off, Athenians were extremely tight with their citizenship requirements. The only way you could become a citizen was if you were a free-born male, and your parents were free-born. “Free-born adult males: Yes, if parents were free-born Athenians.” Any children born from a slave or freed slave would never be eligible to become a citizen. According to document A, Athens’ downfall was due to them being so cold towards the people they had conquered and treated them as “aliens,”. “What was the ruin of Sparta and Athens, but this, that mighty as they were in war, they spurned from them as aliens foreigners those whom they

” Once the government’s disrespect for these people was shown, they lost a lot of respect for themselves, contributing to people’s anger and makes them distraught. Rome was a little different, though. They would accept almost anyone as a citizen (except for slaves or freed slaves.) Rome would allow children of freed slaves, and even women, and though they could not hold public office or vote, they could own their own property. This proves that they had some level of respect for women at least, very much unlike many other ancient civilizations including the Athenian. The rights in each civilization had a clear difference as well. In the Athenian civilization, if you were a citizen you had a rich amount of rights. In Rome, there were different “classes” of citizenship, if you were given it. With each comes a set of rights. You were placed in the Latini kind of citizenship if you were from outside of Rome, but still from somewhere located on the Italian Peninsula. The rights with this